Category Archives: Knightswood Secondary School

Pride month

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Happy Pride month to everyone!

To celebrate, this month’s post will be about how the school LGBT+ club and the library have worked together to create a more inclusive space.

The first step was looking at a very inclusive library (and one of Ms Spaltro’s favourite): the Glasgow Women Library. In October Ms McMillan, the librarian and the LGBT+ club visited the GWL guided by the archivist, Nicola Maksymuik and one of the volunteers, May. We saw unique material and art works; but also discussed equality and respect. Very actual, isn’t it? A new hobby was also discovered: badge making! So loved by everyone that Ms McMillan bought a badge maker for our school as well.

This event – and a Glasgow school librarians training – has encouraged us to fill our library with rainbow flags labels. After a library assistants meeting, it was decided to stick a rainbow flag on the spine of every LGBT+ friendly book in the library, to help every reader to find books with LGBT+ themes. It took months to be ready, but the success was immediate. A handful of pupils from the LGBT+ club became our book reviewers: they have been in charge of reading the new books and identifying if they were LGBT+ friendly and suggesting them to the other pupils. Some titles? Giant Days by John Allison, Heartstopper by Alice Oseman and The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta.

February is the LGBT+ history month and has meant for our assistant lots of debates while they have prepared an amazing book display with a rainbow flag donated by the drama department. Not to forget the brilliant badges and informative material that the Creative Industries class has produced and distributed across the school.

The cherry on the top of the cake has been the brilliant event with Dean Atta thanks to the Wee Write! festival. Meanwhile the library team was working on a more inclusive space; Mr Beaton’s S2 class took part in Words that burn project (check the previous post) and Dean Atta was one of the authors involved. The librarian was so impressed that when the opportunity came up, Ms Spaltro wanted the pupils to meet him. Our LGBT+ readers made sure that every pupil who was going to take part in the event had read the Black Flamingo and prior to the event we chatted about the book for weeks. After having listened to the author’s presentation, we discussed coming out, families, integration and Drag Queens. It has been absolutely stunning to see the pupils so engaged and informed. So proud of them and thanks a lot to the Wee Write! Festival team and of course Dean Atta for inspiring us all.

What’s next? 

Keep having these bookish conversations that encourage events and activities, keep hosting inspiring authors and support every library user to feel confident and welcome in the library. Last but not least, we are working hard to achieve a bronze LGBT+ chart for our school!

For the events pictures, please check our twitter account: @KsSchoolLibrary

Words that burn project

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Hello readers,

I thought of refreshing us in this difficult time with some happy memories from the brilliant ‘words that burn’ project we took part in.

First things first, Words that burn is a national project to explore and express human rights through poetry. Amazing, isn’t it?

The first meeting was held by the poet Ash Dickinson showed us that we can all create poems and put us in a creative mood. Amnesty International representatives launched the project and after an introduction to human rights they divided us in small groups to work on our poems about some of them.

Some of us didn’t even know what a poetry slam was, until we attended one in the Mitchell library theatre. We were incredibly lucky to see the talented Dean Atta, Anita Govan and Jenny Lindsay performing. They were very inspiring, and we have talked about their poems for weeks.

After the encouraging workshop held by Anita Govan, our pupils were ready to take part in the Hillhead Library Local Poetry Slam Competition.

Every group showed great talent and bright minds, and we were very proud when one of our groups won with a sharp poem about climate change.

The last step would have been a final poetry slam in the Mitchell Library, where pupils from all the twelve participating schools would have the chance to see performing few selected pupils and grab a copy of their poems anthology. Unfortunately, we had to postpone this event; but this doesn’t prevent us from sharing our happy memories.

This project wouldn’t have been possible without the support of Amnesty International, SLIC, Glasgow Life and the poets who have collaborated with us. 

Also a huge thank you goes to Knightswood Secondary School, in particular Mr Beaton and his S2 class.

For those who want to know more about the UDHR there is a very good online course about it on Futurelearn at this link:

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/the-universal-declaration-of-human-rights

For now, this is all.  

We hope to be able to share with you our poems and physical celebration soon!

Hello Everybody!

For this month post, we thought to share we you a new project that took place this year: Coderdojo.

We are approaching the end of it, so we think this is a good time to tell you a bit more…

It’s hard to set a specific time when the idea came up, but it was definitely possible thanks to different personalities that work for Glasgow Life, and in particular to Claire, the STEM coordinator.

It took a team effort to identify the right library, the right time and the right pupils for the project, but with the help and support of different librarians across the city, we made it!

The young people were trained for six weeks both by Claire and two youth workers, Joni and Alan. We learnt how to communicate effectively to younger children, how to give instructions, but more importantly we learnt how to be a team.

January marked the “action” time, that meant we could to go to Knightswood community library and finally meet our younger coderdojoers and develop with them their coding skills.

It has been impressively good to see how well the young people responded to the project and interacted between each other.

Last, but not least our mentors: three seniors who worked together to build the perfect team. Their abilities and expertise got perfectly mix and the result is we all have had great time together.

This is what one of our mentors says:

“Coderdojo is not only a good way to teach kids about coding and how to use code, but it is also an enjoyable experience for the young people involved in which they can develop a fun and interesting life skill”.

The results achieved made us confident that this will be just the pilot for a bigger project across the city!

Welcome to our library!

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Hello Everybody!

We have been thinking about this introduction for a while now, and, still we aren’t sure how to condense all the different activities that take place in the library in one post.

The solution we came up with is to choose one library aspect or activity per month and tell you a little bit about it.

To welcome you all in our library we chose the most popular books in the library…

As you may have imagined from the picture, we are talking about Comics and Manga.They have always been in demand, so rather than start with a traditional book club, we decided to have a Comic and Manga club as our first lunch club.

Last year, the librarian used to run different games and competitions. This year beside we have been really lucky to have one of our pupils/library assistants taking the club over.

M. is so talented that most of the drawings that decorate the library are hers, also a huge one on the wall that she colors during her breaks.

She organises different games; like a manga version of “Pictionary” or drawing competitions. Even if we try to incentive and help you developing your drawing skills, don’t worry if you don’t like it, we also enjoy a good chat about manga!

So why don’t you join us?

We meet every Tuesday at lunch break, of course, in the library.